April 2007 -

25/04/2007Planning

Google is the daddy

The Googleplex, home of the world’s most valuable brand. Image courtesy of Keso.

According to new research from WPP released this week, and to which adliterate was given a sneek preview, Google is now officially the most valuable brand on earth – at $66,434m ahead of GE, Microsoft and Coca Cola.

This is the second year that WPP and Millward Brown have produced a ranking of the world’s most powerful brands (using a methodology that is markedly different to other brand equity studies), however it is the first in which Google has reached the top spot.

And yet more proof, if it were needed, that while brands always win the speed at which the brandscape is being rearranged at the moment means no-one can be complacent about their position in peoples’ hearts, minds and wallets.

For the brand valuation geeks I have summarised the WPP approach but you can always cut out the middle-blog and go straight to the study here.

25/04/2007Planning

Blogging and planning – enough already

by Richard5 Comments

Image courtesy of MrTruffle

I am bored witless by the ‘is blogging killing planning?’ debate now -it isn’t, end of story. But in a pathetic attempt to have the last word on the matter here is the very short opinion piece I did for UK ad bible Campaign.

25/04/2007Uncategorized

Adliterate is back

by Richard3 Comments

golden gate.jpg

That bridge shot from the Marin Headlands as the fog rushes into the bay. Image courtesy of John Curley

Been on my hols in the extraordinary and beautiful San Francisco. Clearly unable to post while in a California state of mind on account of feeling too damn nice to my fellow man. Now back in London and as cranky as hell so normal service will be resumed shortly.

05/04/2007Planning

Please think generously

by Richard10 Comments

Image courtesy of Sagasurfer.

Much of my time is spent at the moment thinking about the nature of brand ideas – how to build them, and critically how to spot whether what you have got is good enough.

To date I have been unable to create a fail safe ready reckoner for great brand ideas – although regular readers will know I have a very particular approach to building them.

The truth is that there is no process that you can follow that will churn out great brand ideas, you just sort of, have to have them. And please do not be fooled by charlatans that claim to have a special product, process or workshop to generate these ideas, any hardware is only as good as the software that runs on it.

However, I think that there is one thing that is absolutely true of great brand ideas – they are generous.

04/04/2007Provocations

Too damn right my strategy is showing

by Richard17 Comments

Propaganda – a job to do, something to say and therefore nothing gets in the way

One of the more stupid cliches that you hear banded about advertising agencies is the phrase “your strategy is showing”.

It is usually used by creatives to describe work in which the brand idea is not totally obscured by the creative execution. And by weak planners to explain why their thinking isn’t in the work.

I can’t speak for you but as far as I am concerned strategies should scream out from communications.

I mean why have them if they don’t?

When you think about campaigns like Avis’s ‘we try harder’, BA’s ‘the world’s favourite airline’, Stella’s ‘reassuringly expensive’, BT’s ‘it’s good to talk’, the AA’s ‘fourth emergency service’ or Honda’s ‘power of dreams’ it is bleeding obvious what the brand is up to, the strategy stands out like a modesty at a new business meeting.

Creative work should engage people, provide an emotional connection, build memorability, invite people to join the conversation, absorb them in the moment, build emotional desire and all of those wonderful things that it does. But it should also dramatise the strategy.

I can’t for the life of me think why you wouldn’t want your strategy showing unless of course it is so lifeless and limp that 10,000 volts wouldn’t bring the bloody thing to life.

If that is the case then burying it under layers of creative artifice and never speaking of it again is the least you can do.